


Hufflepuff Forever, Assholes

by daphnaea



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Hogwarts House Sorting, Hogwarts Houses, M/M, Not actually AU, Post-The Raven King, Pre-Epilogue, Pynch Week 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 23:23:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15399867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnaea/pseuds/daphnaea
Summary: The Gangsey discuss which Hogwarts houses they would hypothetically be in. Adam turns out not to be a fan of Harry Potter.Pynch Week Day 1: Hogwarts AU





	Hufflepuff Forever, Assholes

_December, Senior Year of High School_

“Remind me again how old you were when you realized you were gay?” Blue said, laughing.

Ronan flipped her off.

They were spread out across the living room of the Barns, having just finished watching _Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince_ \- not the actual movie, but the DVD version Ronan had dreamed at age twelve after watching the original. It had a lot of extended Quidditch scenes, and Draco Malfoy spent a great deal of time eye-fucking Harry Potter and very little time wearing a shirt. Ginny Weasley did not appear at all.

It was the lazy week between Christmas and New Years, and Ronan had bullied Adam into stringing a few days off of work together, so none of them had anywhere they needed to be. This had been the third movie of the day, interspersed with snacking on holiday leftovers and a sweet, spicy kind of popcorn Henry had produced in the kitchen from unknown ingredients.

Perhaps trying to diffuse a potential fight, Henry rolled away from the screen to face the rest of them and said, “So: our personal version of Hogwarts. Richardman, our glorious leader, definitely Ravenclaw. The blue sheep of a Pureblood family previously composed mainly of Slytherins and the occasional Gryffindor and the only student in fifty years whose favorite class is History of Magic, also mad into Divination and Muggle Studies even though you’re hopeless at both of them.”

Blue grinned at him. “And _you_ \- also a Pureblood, total low-key Gryffindor, no one understands your sorting at first and then you pull some crazy hero bullshit a few years in. You have friends in every house by the end of the first week of First Year. You’re always pestering McGonagall about like the lack of student-led extracurricular activities and getting the House Elves more fashionable tea towels to wear.” She rolled over toward Ronan. “And Lynch - the bad boy of Hufflepuff, half-blood and there are a _million_ rumors about what the other half is, star Quidditch player -”

“Seeker, of course,” Gansey put in, “gifted at Transfiguration and Charms but the only class you reliably show up for is Care of Magical Creatures.”

“Noah would be the Hufflepuff ghost,” Ronan added. “He would ghost-skateboard down the stairs and shit.”

Gansey pointed at Adam, who looked up from where he was slouched on the sofa under Ronan’s arm. “Obvious Slytherin,” he said. “Muggleborn but top of your classes -”

Ronan felt Adam tense, and Henry, apparently seeing something happening on his face, interrupted, “But one of the good Slytherins, like, um, Harry’s kid with the ridiculous name. And can we just take a moment please here to appreciate that Harry Potter grew up to marry a cheap imitation of his dead mother who obviously got no say in what to name her own kids, he never learned to control his temper, and was so emotionally stunted by his childhood trauma he should seriously never have procreated. Sometimes I think Rowling was trolling us all along and the real moral of Harry Potter is that people of mediocre talent but unusually good luck always win out so there’s no point in really trying hard at anything.”

“Albus Severus,” Blue offered, “cause who doesn’t want to name their son after the mentor who turned out to be training you up as a child soldier for a suicide mission and the abusive teacher who preempted all your own Oedipal issues by wanting to kill your father and marry your mother for you?”

“I can’t put my finger on which house you’d be in, though,” Gansey told her, rubbing his lower lip contemplatively, before launching into some theory that Ronan tuned out because Adam chose that moment to push himself up off the couch and leave the room without explanation, shoulders still stiff with tension.

Gansey must have said something typically Gansey-ish, though, because by the time Ronan turned back to them Blue was glaring daggers at him and saying, “Not having a stereotypically simplistic personality does _not_ make me a squib, not that I’d want to attend a snobby school for upper-crust racists with no arts program, incompetent teachers, a criminally lax attitude toward student safety, enslaved minorities doing the cooking, and a Board of Governors made up of literal fascists in the first place, thank you very much, not that any of that would bother the scion of the Ancient and Most Dickish House of Gansey, would it?”

Uninterested in watching Gansey try to dig himself out whatever hole he’d stumbled into, Ronan stalked off to find Adam. He wasn’t anywhere downstairs or on the porch, so Ronan headed up to search the bedrooms.

Adam was in Declan’s room, flipping through a textbook without seeming to be looking for anything. If he’d been in Ronan’s room, Ronan would have taken this as an invitation to join him. He generally went to Declan’s room when he wanted some space, but in this case he’d left the door ajar, and the look on his face made Ronan want to interrupt his thoughts.

Ronan pushed the door further open and waited to see how Adam would respond.

Adam looked up and, after a moment, blinked and nodded a vague invitation.

Ronan entered the room and shut the door behind him, leaning back against it.

Adam looked back down at his book. “I never liked the Harry Potter stuff,” he said after a pause, voice flat and unhappy. “You’d think it would have been like perfect wish fulfillment fantasy bullshit for me, I know, but it cut too close to home or something. I’d just look at Harry getting his magic and his friends and his adventures and his tables full of food, and I’d just think, that’s not how it goes. Harry’s just going to wake up again in the closet under the stairs, hungry, with no one there but the spiders, and having dreamed something better is only going to make it worse when he has to cook his shitty relatives breakfast in the morning. Or else fuck him, for getting all that when the rest of us never will.”

Ronan smirked at him. “Sorry to rain on your pity parade, but you did get all that. I’ll even dream you some fucking treacle tart if you tell me what the shit it actually is.”

“Yeah.” Adam smiled without humor. “So this must be right when I’m about to wake up back where I started. Happy endings are for the good guys anyway, not the asshole Slytherins.”

Ronan’s restraint - tenuous at the best of times - cracked at this, and he crossed the room to drop down onto the bed next to Adam and bury his face in his shoulder. As ever the scent of his skin and hair grounded Ronan in a visceral contentment, and he wondered vaguely if it was fair to take this kind of comfort from an obviously upset Adam.

“You saw the DVD,” he muttered into Adam’s neck. “I think asshole Slytherins are hot.”

This earned him a huff of laughter, and then Adam’s hand brushed across his head, tentative at first and then again more firmly.

“I promise this is real,” Ronan added, “but I can arrange for some spiders if that would make you feel more at home. It’d be a nice fucking surprise for Declan next time he comes around too.”

Adam chuckled without real mirth. “No thanks.” He sighed. “They piss me off so much sometimes,” he admitted, gesturing toward their friends downstairs, “even though I know it’s not really them I’m angry at.” Another humorless laugh. “Guess I’m just too emotionally stunted from my childhood trauma.”

Ronan could not exactly refute this and thought it would be unhelpful to point out that Adam was probably, slowly getting better, so instead he grabbed Adams shoulders and pulled them both down onto the mattress so Adam was lying half on top of him, one leg between Ronan’s and his head on Ronan’s chest. Ronan slid his other hand up under the back of Adam’s shirt, not teasing but just touching, skin to skin.

For a second Adam tensed, and just a month ago this would have caused Ronan in turn to release him and pull away, but now he waited, and sure enough Adam relaxed into him once he’d had time to adjust, wrapping one hand around Ronan’s arm and shifting against him to get comfortable.

“When I first met you,” Ronan told him, “everything I loved had been taken away from me and I didn’t know how to live without it. Didn’t even know if I wanted to. I liked watching you, though. Partly ‘cause you’re nice to look at and partly ‘cause I could tell you were fucked up too, and that made me feel less alone. And then I got to know you and what your life was like and I found out you weren’t in my situation, you’d just never had anything to love in the first place. But you were still trying so fucking hard. You were building something new for yourself out of fucking fumes and duct tape and broken shoelaces, and I thought if you could do that, then maybe I could find a way to live too. So don’t you fucking think I’m here in spite of your fucked up shit or for the sake of who you might be after years of therapy or whatever the lame ass Jerry McGuire bullshit.”

Adam’s grip on him tightened. “Cheng was wrong about me, though. I don’t know what Harry Potter’s kid’s deal is but I gather he’s some noble Slytherin with ambitions to make the world a better place or something. But I’m just the regular kind of asshole. I just wanted money and prestige and to prove I was better than my dad and rub his nose in it.”

“Wow you total jerk, you wanted to feel worthy and be treated with respect and not be fucking poor as dirt, that’s so fucking evil.”

Adam didn’t laugh though, he just drew in a long breath and said, almost too quietly to hear, “I killed our Latin teacher.”

“He murdered Noah, and nearly killed - like - all of us.”

“He wasn’t murdering anyone when I made him die. Would you have let him in the circle if it’d been you?”

Ronan rubbed circled on Adam’s back with his thumb. “I don’t know. But I’m glad he’s dead.”

“Me too,” Adam admitted. “I tried to feel guilty about what I did and I couldn’t. I don’t regret it. I think a good person would regret it, though.”

“I think a good person wouldn’t miss K,” Ronan confessed. “He was a murderer and an honest to fuck psychopath and he nearly killed _Matthew,_ and I know he had to go because he was fucking Cabeswater and also, whatever the fuck, killing people, but if it hadn’t been for that, if it had just been me and him and not all the collateral damage, I would still want him around. Not - not too close, but… still _there._ He was…” Ronan didn’t know the word for what Kavinsky was to him. Not a friend or a boyfriend but a mirror of all the things about himself he had fucking hated but couldn’t give up. The only other person he’d known, since his father died, who had no limits.

“You liked that he wanted you.” It wasn’t exactly a question.

“Yes. I didn’t like him, but I liked everything he made me feel.” Ronan paused to reconsider. “Up until the end, anyway.”

Adam tilted his head up to press a kiss to Ronan’s chin. “I don’t think caring about someone can make you a bad person. Even if that someone is Kavinsky.”

Ronan didn’t think caring was the right word, but he was sick of all of it, of the two of them weighing up their sins, of Adam of all fucking people finding himself wanting. He exhaled hard. “Fuck being the good guy or the bad guy anyway,” he said. “Fuck Hogwarts houses and choosing a personality like a favorite color. I could be a fucking Slytherin. I could be ambitious, I could dedicate my life to dreaming up a flying car that went a thousand miles per hour.”

“Maybe my ambition is to be as loyal as a Hufflepuff,” Adam offered tentatively. “I could choose one person and never let him go no matter what.”

 _It doesn’t fucking mean anything_ , Ronan told himself fiercely as his arms tightened around Adam. It had been a fucking hypothetical statement about a fucking hypothetical person, and Adam had sounded about as certain as he would have been saying he could maybe be Batman when he grew up, so there was no goddamn reason why Ronan should suddenly find himself unable to breathe. “You’d be a fucking fantastic Hufflepuff,” he eventually managed to say.

“Guys!” Blue called from downstairs. “We’re about to start _The Grinch Who Stole Christmas!_ ”

Ronan sat up, tugging Adam along with him. “You don’t want to miss this,” he said.

Adam quirked an inquiring eybrow.

“In my version, Declan’s the Grinch,” he explained, “and at the end one of the girls in the village kisses him and he turns into a frog, and then they put him at the top of their Christmas tree and he starts croaking carols.” He grinned nostalgically. “And he had to let us watch it because it was Matty’s favorite.”

Adam let himself be pulled off the bed. He paused for a moment as if he might say something, then just smiled a little and squeezed Ronan’s hand.

Ronan squeezed back.


End file.
